Lenovo discontinues automatic System Update for ThinkPads - <AUTHOR> http://www.thinkpads.com/2009/04/02/lenovo-discontinues-automatic-system-update/

<comment><USER2> This is going to make installing a retail copy of Windows yourself on a Thinkpad a real pain. With the updater service you just grab the updater and the rest is automatic. The little bits of sofware that you need for things like the battery manager and the onscreen displays are strewn around in small packages that you otherwise have to install manually.

</comment><comment><USER3> Meh, most of those system updater apps are borderline bloat/crapware anyways. Also, it's not always wise to have the latest driver version for all of your hardware.

My rule of thumb after 12 years of hardcore Windows geekery (and yes plenty of gaming) is if it aint' broke, don't upgrade the driver.

There are a few exceptions to this rule but not enough to warrant an entire app who's job it is to keep you 100% updated all the time (bugs be damned).

</comment><comment><USER4> Although a lot of cruft comes through along with useful updates, I will miss this. It is almost like Ubuntu's system update: a single, semi-serialized point of entry for periodic fixes and feature adds for things you have installed. I don't relish the idea of hunting this stuff down on an individual basis.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> The outrage is palpable. [http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Special_...](http://forums.lenovo.com/lnv/board/message?board.id=Special_Interest_Utilities&thread.id=4397&view=by_date_ascending&page=3)</comment>


Ask HN: What is the best way to backup an external HDD to the cloud? - <AUTHOR> I have a couple of external HDDs with a ton of raw audio data on them (I used to produce music full time). It occurred to me the other day that if these drives die I have no backups. I would like to archive these into a cloud storage service so I can rest easy. What's the best way? <comment><USER2> I had to come up with a solution to back up my Lightroom catalogs and raw archive hard drives. I dump an image of each and upload it to s3 and gdrive. Pretty manual, but I do it once per year or so.

I choose to dump an image against i.e tar.bz because I can rely on the fs checksum in case of data degradation.

<comment><AUTHOR> Good idea. This will work for me because I'm just backing up what are essentially archives. Thanks!

</comment></comment><comment><USER3> Might help your responses if you'd mention how much data we're talking about ;)

Without knowing that, I'd say BackBlaze. Just be sure to connect them once a month.

Alternatively, get a Synology with enough disk space, then put it at a friend's house.

</comment><comment><USER4> I like this

[https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/disk/](https://aws.amazon.com/snowball/disk/)</comment>


Cloudflare CEO Has to Explain Lack of Pirate Site Terminations - <AUTHOR> https://torrentfreak.com/cloudflare-ceo-has-to-explain-lack-of-pirate-site-terminations-171010/ <comment><USER2> Why do copyright holders feel that other sites should do enforcement for them? It's Cloudflare's servers so it's Cloudflare's rules.

<comment><USER3> > Why do copyright holders feel that other sites should do enforcement for > them?

Because its the law.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_Act)

If you don't follow the Safe Harbor provisions of the DMCA (as Cloudflare is a US based corporation), you are no longer protected from liability.

I mentioned in the Daily Stormer HN thread this would come back to bite Cloudflare:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032517](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032517)

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032956](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15032956)

<comment><USER4> Do they not teach critical thinking at ALL in K-12/colleges? I mean, it honestly feels like the world has gotten... dumber... since when I started using the internet to discuss and debate topics.

I keep seeing this trend of "it's okay to do X, because the end justifies the means" and if you don't like it, you're probably a Nazi.

When Obama was in office I kept pleading with people over and over. They would say, "Congress is gridlocking him, so he has to go around them!" Okay! But Obama doesn't exist in a vacuum. He's a President setting PRECEDENTS. (Note the c.) You can swell the executive branch and do whatever you want... but eventually _your guy leaves the office_ and all those powers you gave the office are now available to the new guy. A new guy... you might not agree with.

The same applies to YouTube, Facebook, Twitter and now Cloudflare. You may agree with them NOW but you might not four years from now. And all those censorship tools will be used against _you_.

Further, the second you make a distinction between what "is" and "isn't" acceptable, you are no longer a passive carrier. You are an arbitor. You are a judge. You are an enforcer.

The guy who hands you your mail isn't legally liable for the content of the words inside. He doesn't open it. But if he had a service where he opening all your mail and deciding which mail to give you, and then accidentally leaves off an important bill, he's open to being sued.

I mean, has anybody really thought about what Facebook et al really are? Utilities. Almost complete monopolies that provide utilities for communication. What else is a utility? Your phone. Imagine if your text messages and phone calls were scanned to prevent you from sending nude pics to comply with state law. Would you be okay with it? How about censoring any mention of sodomy, which is still illegal in many states? Hmm, all a sudden our rights matter again.

The current generation seems to have completely forgotten that you can't have two classes. You can't have rights for some, and trampled for others, just so it's easier to "fight the nazis." And this fight-the-nazis logical fallacy has become the new version of "Think of the Children!" and our current generation has learned NOTHING from the past. You change the name, call a new set of people "sinners" (the same way the authoritarian rightwingers did in the 90's), and shame people into submission but it's the same lynch mob mentality.

It's the same logic and witchhunts currently being used to attack nazis, that I personally watched happen to gays in the 90's and it's saddening, disturbing, and scary all at once. How a mere 20 years can pass and we're lynching a whole new group of people... having learned nothing.

I mean, what if we applied the same logic of "Rights don't matter if it's for a good cause" to Muslims? Tons of "not nazis" have been swept up as "almost nazis" or "might-as-well-be nazis / nazi supporters" and attacks have been done against them. All for the "greater good." Why shouldn't we do the same thing to potential Muslim extremists and "almost" extremists and might-as- well-be extremists? Why shouldn't we "punching a Muslim".

Oh, wait, because that's bigoted and hateful as hell. Yeah. Whoops?

A Muslim argues for chopping off little girl's genitals and nobody riots in the streets and burns down the city. But a KKK member stands up and before they open their mouth, they're surrounded by 10x the counter-protesters as there are supporters.

Pretty interesting how the "march against fascism" doesn't include certain fascists. Oh look, there's even an older word for it:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamofascism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Islamofascism)

        [Islamofascism] is a term drawing an analogy between the ideological characteristics of specific
        Islamist movements and a broad range of European fascist movements of the early 20th century,
        neofascist movements, or totalitarianism.

Looks like we're only for "fighting fascists" if they pass a skin color test first.</comment></comment></comment>


Digidorm live again - Took all of your advice - <AUTHOR>

About 8 weeks ago I submitted questions for a critique of my business www.digidorm.com.  I took the advice of many responders - made it much easier to register, much clearer in the header of the site what it is to be used for, and redesigned the GUI a bit to clarify hi-level content. I'm now resubmitting for further feedback.  I added a scholarship contest to try and generate more traffic to the site (details at www.digidorm.com/contest) - perhaps you can feedback on that as well? Thanks.  The feedback was very valuable last time and I look forward to your responses again..James <comment><USER2> Clickable: <http://digidorm.com>

I remember that thread, James. It looks like you've made decent progress and have heeded the advice from commenters here.

It is always a process to build that visual argument on a homepage to sell visitors on the concept. If I could change one thing, it would probably be to whittle down your pitch into one sentence and blow up that text up so it's extremely prominent. (e.g. "Digidorm: blog with us about your university and win a $1k scholarship.") Way to iterate and ask for feedback.

</comment><comment><USER3> I know this sounds insignificant, but the first thing that jumped out at me was the JPEG artifacting in the logo. You'd do well to replace the logo with a PNG and replace that orange text-in-an-image with actual text.

<comment><USER4> I agree. Will immediately look much more professional.

Also you have CC link at the bottom, but not to what license and not what bit of all the content is licensed that way.

Also take out the tag cloud on the main page. It probably slows down things for both you serverside and the user's computer and is so far down the page no one will ever see it.

Overall I would just say to cut down greatly on clutter. It detracts/confuses from the overall point of creating a conversation around the community of each school.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> Great idea on the contest - many students are facing beaucoup financial hardship, and this gives them hope. Honestly, a few students are working mostly on contests as classes start. And if digidorm can resist the decline in quality like hacker news, that is good news. We very badly need real world tools for students as they try and hack their way to a degree, so please keep thefocus on using digidorm to give students the tools and contexts to understand Higher Ed so that they might transform it....And the point below about whittling down your pitch is spot on.

</comment><comment><USER6> For what it's worth, I like the idea for the site....particularly the prospects of getting really specific info about schools that is neither university-funded PR, or the crap that passes for 'Rate My Professor' dot com. I think the format could prove to be a little more inviting than Facebook (in this regard), as a I find the latter to be better for person-to-person communication as opposed to a place to find out decent info on specific topics (such as a college or university). Just my two cents.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> As with last time, amazing feedback. I LOVE the new mission statement - I was just too close to the entire project to come up with something so brief and clear (and believe me, I slaved over what is there for a while). And the GUI edits - I'm already talking to my GD about implementing some of them. Thanks Ycombinators - you all are an inspiration! Peace...James

</comment><comment><USER7> I visited this site and found it to be very easy to register and get going. The site is a great idea overall. I think the scholarship contest is not only a clever idea but one that represents the site well. Digidorm is definitely worth checking out...Matt

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> Alright - check it out, I had the explanation at the top of the site edited to reflect the suggestion made here by systemtrigger. and we made the content not part of the image and made the logo a PNG. what do you think?

</comment><comment><USER8> I liked the book scholarship idea.

I would like to suggest that to make finding colleges easier you make it so you can jump to the first letters of the school instead of numbers of the page.

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> thanks everyone. ill talk to my developer about the possibility of having a better search device. please, keep it coming. ill do my best to incorporate the best ideas. we've already begun working in a test environment to implement a new header statement and graphics.

</comment><comment><USER9> i like the improvements; good work. also like the scholarship contest idea.</comment>


Delusions of Bosslessness - <AUTHOR> http://blog.idonethis.com/post/35783868428/delusions-bosslessness

<comment><USER2> The other challenge of "Bosslessness" is that when two projects disagree it gets nasty, and sometimes really really nasty.

Oh and a few sociopaths in the bosslessness pool can destroy a company in no time.</comment>


What They Know - <AUTHOR> http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk/

<comment><AUTHOR> And a similar site for apps: [http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk- mobile/](http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk-mobile/)

</comment><comment><USER2> Kudos to them for including themselves.</comment>


How to focus in a startup? Make a daily "not until". - <AUTHOR> http://venturefizz.com/blog/how-focus-startup-make-daily-%E2%80%9Cnot-until%E2%80%9D#.Uxh6nyLAHTc.hackernews <comment><USER2> good ideas, I try to do something similar in emacs org-mode, it just tends to get unwieldly after awhile.

<comment><USER3> Aye, +1 for org mode. I too use org-mode extensively. Perhaps you should try using a combination of custom TODO capture templates, custom agenda views, and/or org-mode's built-in sparse tree generation to help filter through the noise in your (undoubtedly sprawling) orgfiles directory. Not that I've fully implemented this myself, of course, but it's all on the roadmap to org nirvana...</comment></comment>


Microsoft Cloud Revenues Up 100% - <AUTHOR> http://www.theregister.co.uk/2016/07/20/microsoft_q4_fy2016_azure_phones/ <comment><USER2> Higher revenue suggests Microsoft had the right idea by elevating a leader from their cloud services to the top.</comment>


Don't build private clouds - <AUTHOR> https://m.subbu.org/dont-build-private-clouds-9a54b3d30c8b <comment><USER2> Yeah so we have a different story. We build Natural Language Processing and statistics software. We tried the cloud first, but it was just unworkable. Limited IOPS, outrageous prices for even a modest amount of RAM, slow virtualized CPUs, limited GPU options with terrible performance. So one day I hired half a rack, bought some machines with fast SSDs, 128GB RAM each, dual CPU with high clockspeed, and even some boxes with GPUs. The difference was incredible. Not just in performance, which was orders of magnitudes faster (going from barely workable to "pleasant user experience" without any software changes), but also in terms of cost. If we were to provision these machines on Azure or E2 we'd spend in a month what these machines cost, and our current current costs are maybe $500 in electricity + rack rental. Sure, it's a bit of a workout to put stuff in racks, but I actually quite enjoyed doing it. Sure stuff will break and things will go down. We can take the downtime at this point. And seriously, cost and performance wise there is no competition between cloud and rolling your own hardware (if you know how to do it). Also I'm perpetually surprised by how overstated the complexity of this is, yes it's tricky. But so is CSS, and Javascript these days. And unless you go "full cloud" (never go full cloud), you still have to manage fallover/redudancy/CI/provisioning yourself. It's not much different on "actual" hardware (there is no cloud, it's just somebody else's computer). If my firewall or switch catches fire, that might be problematic. But if that happens at an Amazon or Azure data center, that's also problematic. At the very least you'll suffer terrible latency because it needs to move the VMs dynamically.

<comment><USER3> Rock on anon' \-- we feel the same way!

Once you get above a few boxes though, you might need some pricey geeks for a month or two to rig up cobbler, ceph, openstack, proxmox, or whatever-takes-ya simply because it's quicker than getting up on all that yourself right away -- but really there is no magic involved here and it's just so you can have it totally manageable as you grow.

The tooling is much more friendly these days; and to be totally honest -- provisioning _probably_ isn't the problem you're trying to solve anyway (more likely packaging/deployment/ci is the pain after you got a bit of breathing space on perf). I've seen loads of folks coming back on prem spend months rigging up crazy vm provisioning things when their estate is basically static because they didn't realise they were solving the wrong problem.

If your ops time is spent building machines, then sort that out. Probably and more likely it's spent on getting apps running and dealing with moving traffic about and deployments and such; so that's the real thing to work on.

I think the 'complexity' argument seem so loud on HN as the opsy people are the minority here and it's not exactly a sexy/exciting/fun thing to pick up, and when it goes wrong it's brutal, especially when you can be nailing features instead.

All I'd say is -- regardless of what you're doing, getting into containers at this point makes your life quite a lot easier; you get a standard deployable unit of code you can throw into aws, or on prem depending on your workload, and it removes a lot of the anti-patters of config mgt.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> If you are handling data that is subject to national regulations concerning personal data (e.g., health care) using a cloud provider for all your needs is risky and might not be legal. If you use one of the big-name (and therefore affordable) providers such as Amazon, your data may very well fall under America's Patriot Act — there is a lot of legal uncertainty about this. If I go with a local party instead, there is also no guarantee that this company in turn won't branch out to the US, or get bought up by an American company, again putting citizen's private data in reach of (in my case) foreign governments.

<comment><USER5> Erm, no. All major cloud providers have clear statements regarding data sovereignty, compliance and whatnot. There is no uncertainty, only lack of awareness (but I'll freely grant that it is not a simple matter).

Look for the equivalent of [https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/TrustCenter/Transparency#Tra...](https://www.microsoft.com/en- us/TrustCenter/Transparency#Transparent)

(Full disclosure: I work at Microsoft)

<comment><USER3> Do you honesty believe that?

Maybe I'm too cynical these days, but I find it pretty laughable that a statement regarding 'data sovereignty' has any real meaning at all these days.

Unless you control the hardware, you have no idea what the hypervisors are doing on your rented vm's. The idea that national actors don't / wouldn't pull anything they want from them seems comically naive to me. Christ, we can barely trust our own hardware anymore with backdoored firmware crap, IME and such..

Realistically though, most companies don't care so it's not a problem if you keep the blinkers on; their compliance folks just want the document which says it's not happening and they'll never know when it does so who cares. Their ops folks can barely use the APIs probably, let alone contemplate the impact of someone reading the memory of my databases from the hypervisors.

As an individual and someone who cares for my data or that of my clients though, that's not enough for me, and I'd never trust tnese folks with any data, only mindless compute and serving public content...

<comment><USER6> Don't you share this data over networks from time to time? Is all your data siloed and bolted down to one place never to move anywhere? How do you trust the data to not take a hike in some random direction you don't fully trust?

<comment><USER7> By encrypting anything you transmit over the Internet?

<comment><USER8> and anything you have on hardware you don't own. And on hardware you own.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> The article does not address important topics such as privacy and security.

For some organizations using a private cloud is not a technical decision but instead a political/ethics one.

As an example I would bet that there are several companies out there who would not care if all services were down for a full day (in their private cloud), as long as they were certain that no government could easily access them.

<comment><USER10> GovernmentS can't host their services on Google's or Amazon's cloud for example.

(the US are not counting since this is THE government many others are not trusting and the home of the public clouds)

<comment><USER6> The FUD is strong, but that was exactly the point of that article. Having old- fashioned people in goverments who disagree that they should ditch their datacenters and start using clouds, is backwards thinking.

Just like goverments find ways to allow private companies to run their cellular networks, phone networks, tv cable networks, power grids - the same reasoning should allow private companies (public clouds) who do it much better than goverment employees, to run their compute services.

<comment><USER3> I'm not so sure.

There's a lot of gov.uk stuff running on non-gvt gear these days thanks to GDS; (aws, skyscape, others on gcloud) -- the problem with how that's gone though is while they're actually running in "the cloud" and tryig to do things more 'modern' the architecture has to be accredited by a bunch of GCHQ folks who apparently are totally insane yet you can never actually talk to. And so you end up only being able to build what looks like a 2000's datacentre arch with 500 /28 vlans and weird IDS appliances and so on, otherwise CESG won't let you hook up to any of the data-sources you probably need.

In that style arch, where you can't just provision things and changing even a netmask requires your whole architecture to be re-accredited otherwise you'll lose access to the PSN; what possible benefits are there of running in the cloud?

It's more expensive, needs constant oversight from accreditors and generally sucks.

The legacy gov DCs are a shitshow too; but that's down to people like capgemini and ibm or whoever and well, fuck them.

<comment><USER6> You mean the IBM that is doing $10m contracts and then paying $30m for screwing these up? [http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay- over-$30m-i...](http://www.abc.net.au/news/2016-11-25/ibm-to-pay-over-$30m-in- compensation-for-census-fail/8057240)

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Okay, I wrote out a whole breakdown of everything that's wrong with this post, but after I re-read it, it came across as so harsh that I've just deleted the lot.

TBH; the only people who would have agreed with me knew my points anyway so bother?

I felt like as this is my specific area, that I have a kind of responsibility to people who read misinformation like this to help see through such stuff. It's hard to do for me without getting kind of angry though; opinions like this is why I end up having to deal with 800k/month aws bills and 3 hour deploys..

Either way; regardles of me -- please, people -- if you think that the 'typical journey' of implementing your own infrastructure and migrating a legacy application to run on it is _ANYTHING_ like the description in this blog post, then please take it from me as someone who moves horrible legacy codebases into CD for a living, that you should perhaps seek some alternative advice.

Suubu; I'm sorry, I'm not trying to be mean but your typical' private cloud journey is complete and utter horseshit.

<comment><USER11> > TBH; the only people who would have agreed with me knew my points anyway so > bother?

Can you please actually elaborate, or it defeats the point of your entire post. While the rant may have helped you, I don't know you, I don't your history, and this post doesn't encourage me to go through your post history to find it.

At the same time, OP's post filled me with a slight sense of dread as I'm about to go into a private cloud environment and wondered if I was making a mistake. Your post has certainly calmed those nerves. Actually having some meat with the mustard would help more.

Thanks in advance!

<comment><USER3> Well, I don't want to pick the whole thing apart because I've been a bit too mean already, but the 'typical' process of private cloud in that post is bullshit.

Lets make some assumptions on this gig you're starting then, we'll imagine you're going into some job at a place which has a horrible legacy codebase (lets' go medieval assume struts and oracle 10, deployed with some ancient bamboo/rpm concoction which takes forever and always dies and the existing ops team barely keep the lights on, let alone are capable of keeping up with the rate dev is trying to let the business move..).

So you land. They've got a fresh budget, a load of bearded scala devs who are rewriting the whole thing as microservices and words like "ISB" and "ASYNC" are being thrown around. Hell, someone even mentioned elixir in the bar on your welcome drinkies.

You're going to drag this horrible monster into the new world, but to get there and to a better arch you're going to have to replace it a bit at a time, and while that happens the code that's making all the money needs to be maintained, and it needs to change faster. And you're going to do this on prem.

So. You land. On prem, ooooeh baby. Realise: the pain you're going to have is not going to be how you instantiate vms to run the apps or spin up loadbalancer IPs or whatever the arse else infra wise -- AWS will do all that right away for you for sure, while working out how to get a bunch of tin to do it will take longer, but it's like getting into first gear slightly faster than the guy beside you on a F1 race -- in the long run, this isn't where the time is going to be spent.

Lets say you're the ops dude instead, how do you move a few hundred hand built centos and java boxes to some kind of api based provisioning thingy with no config management? Yeah well.. There are a lot of options, if you're the one building it out, tbh the best choice for the infra part of the provisioning is just to pay someone to make this their problem. Redhat. Vmware. Whoever does Proxmox. Whatever. You'll lose E-Penis points but who cares your job is to help the business work faster. Even if you have do it yourself, there is a large ecosystem around things such as openstack or proxmox or smartos or whatever cobbler and so on, and this stuff is pretty friendly, it won't take you _THAT_ long. Hire a contractor for a bit. Blammo.

The post talks about doing 'compute' then 'storage' and 'network' then 'stateless monoliths' and so on. Whatever. That's not reality. Why is the business paying for this? They want to be able to iterate quicker! CD is a tough goal with a legacy codebase, but they got used to agile and hell if it's not going to get faster -- the job is to enable that in any way possible, the tricky part of that is not going to be how you deal with infra, it's how you get the code through a pipeline and deploying painlessy.

Infra is a pain point. Legacy environments are fragile as hell and good operations folks are few and far between, and most of them are undervalued and a bit weird. -- but you personally, oarsinsync, are going to better off on prem for a few simple reasons in that world:

1) Total Ownership: Something goes titsup? Yeah, your team owns the entire show up until your ISP. Network borks? Storage slows down? It's all yours. Dig in. AWS develops cross-az latency? Log a ticket and 2 days later when they respond you'll have already forgotten it happened. Explain that to the business.

2) Perf: Don't believe the rubes; you'll be quicker on your own gear if only because you can move your noisy VMs to sep machines, set various limits/quotes/throttles that you can't on a public cloud, and you're not sharing spindles with 300 mongo vms.

3) Expierence: It's not exactly a business goal, but you'll learn more when you're having to stace some jvm at 3:00am and crying into a toilet than if you're just bouncing instances and getting away with shit code. If you just outsource all your problems forever you'll never be able to have an opinion on them, even if that opinion is just "I never want to use RAC again" or "mongodb is death" or whatever..

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> I don't quite agree with the cost analysis. You either spend on building your infrastructure or integrating public cloud services. You will pay your devops team anyway. Owning stuff is usually cheaper than renting, there are many cases when it can make sense to have your own hardware.

</comment><comment><USER13> > Phase 3: Then deal with the stateful monoliths. These are your large > monolithic databases. This is usually where private cloud journey hits the > wall due to the risk and complexity in making such monoliths cloud native.

We are tasked with moving to the cloud, and this is where everything stops. Over the years, instead of fixing the monolithic database design, the company instead kept beefing up the hardware for the database. A bigger cpu and more ram is cheaper up front than re-engineering the entire company infrastructure.

And now we are paying for it. Our db hardware now is the highest end hardware the db software supports. None of the cloud providers db support can handle it. We are forced to fix the monolithic design if we are to move to the cloud. It will be a multi-year effort.

<comment><USER14> > It will be a multi-year effort

And the company is willing to go through it because the public cloud offers so much?

Just curious if this was going to stop the overall project or not.

<comment><USER13> We were bought out by investors and this is their major initiative. I assume it is to reduce long term operating costs.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> This last point trumps all others:

"[...] on-premise infrastructure on the other-hand brews a culture of mistrust, centralization, dependency and control. [...] These difference between on-premise data centers and public clouds influence how teams think, plan and execute. These are nothing but attributes of culture."

I'm currently working with a large financial services organisation that is moving to the cloud. It's incredibly painful, because of all the challenges involved in guaranteeing the safety and security of private data etc., but once these hurdles are taken once, it's incredibly liberating. The move is not just a technical one though, it requires a change of culture as well.

<comment><USER6> Unfrotuantely, all too often when a company is moving some workloads to a public cloud, they take along the same culture they use in their "private" datacenter.

<comment><USER15> Absolutely. Fortunately, in this case, we are actually moving _because_ we want to change culture.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> Private clouds wouldn't be the recurring disaster that they are if the people who built them had used AWS before. Instead of "don't build private clouds," I'd offer "If you think Openstack means 'free VMWare,' you've already failed."

</comment><comment><USER17> If you store your data with a third party cloud provider, government agencies can legally compel your cloud provider to give them your data while preventing them from telling you. If your data is on-premises, they'll have to come and take it from you. If you are a multinational company with entities in multiple geographies and related party transactions, you know what you'd prefer.

<comment><USER6> The Pirate Bay

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I was musing yesterday whether a technologically-advanced nation state of the future might provide cloud infrastructure like it provides roads/rail/healthcare/etc.

Obviously, this only makes sense in a world where individuals as well as corps need to present themselves online as a matter of course, but it might enable eg personal ID or data privacy tools that address many of the problems people have 'donating' their private data to commercial orgs.

<comment><USER19> A wet dream for police states. Distribute dumb terminals to government-run cloud servers for free and soon enough the only people who don't make their whole life transparent to the state are the criminals.

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> What about privacy? Our company doesn't use a cloud provider for that exact reason.

<comment><USER6> Have you investigated the issues with privacy in public clouds, or do you just "assume" that it is much worse than your own mismanaged hardware without doing any due diligence?

From exprience, most organisations manage the privacy of their customers much much worse on their own hardware than they would if they used a public cloud provider.

Want to know how "privacy" really looks like? Take a look here - [http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds-...](http://www.informationisbeautiful.net/visualizations/worlds- biggest-data-breaches-hacks/)

<comment><USER3> The difference is simply though that they own the entire scope of the privacy concerns on prem; even if they manage them poorly.

In the public cloud, as an engineer/employee/government I can just login to any given XEN/KVM/SmartOS/Whatever host that's running your instances and simply read your secrets and even if your opsec is perfect there's nothing you can do about it.

'privacy' in the cloud is not about mismanagement/good practice -- it's about who is able to act on it.

There is no way that anything you have running on infra you don't completely own and control will ever be private; to even a casual observer it's obvious that there is absolutely no defense or privacy possible in such an environment.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Am I missing something here?

Is your point that everyone should move to the public cloud because you think it's "difficult" to build a "private" one?

Sorry to be blunt, but are you joking, an idiot or just completely unaware of the reality our industry outside of startup land?

Forgetting the compliance reasons, or that I have zero confidence that a combination of giant American corporations have any interest in protecting my data and that of my users, forgetting also that the performance differences are incredibly significant (take 8 15k sas's in raid 10 vs.. what? EBS with 2k 'provisioned IOPS' on a shared san over iscsi?), the cost savings are much more significant than you claim here.

I recently bought a half rack load of dell boxes which have like 380GB of ram each and 52 threads, and they cost around £4k each.

Even with a whole army of overpriced ops dudes to install openstack or kubernetes on all that, the cost we spent would be spanked in a month on AWS for similar capacity, and mine isn't a recurring one.

Why does it have to be so black and white for you folks?

A "private cloud" is absolutely the correct choice for a lot of people. If I were you I'd quietly delete that post, because I've absolutely judged you -- and probably unfairly -- on the content. On that, I wouldn't hire you.

Listen, both these things have a place, but they're NOT competing in the minds of those of us running serious infra. AWS allows us to prototype apps rapidly, to put project work on a credit card associated with a specific project budget instead of spending the shared budget, and for sure there are some nice services which do a bit of heavy lifting for us which helps speed that up.

After that phase though, very, very few people things actually need or make sense to stay there once it becomes a real product. Your scaling concerns are not being well served by 1000s of ec2 instances. Moving back in house is usually the smarter option.

If you're pumping loads of data into the internet, then you should be behind a CDN and the origin shouldn't be smashed to the point where you're dependent on throwing compute into the void to cope. Akamai or CloudFlare are cheaper than deploying 100s of ec2's because some shitty code can't handle your traffic.

If data is coming in, read a book on queues; you'd be pretty surprised what you can do with even two 1U boxes and a good software architecture. We could handle 100k+/sec of messages back in the java 1.5 and activemq days with 1U sparc boxes; how much do you recon it costs to do that today in AWS?

tl;dr - urgh. lets' talk in 10 years.

</rant>

<comment><USER21> > If I were you I'd quietly delete that post, because I've absolutely judged > you -- and probably unfairly -- on the content. On that, I wouldn't hire > you.

Based on your reply, I suspect most people wouldn't want to be hired by you, either...

<comment><USER22> Well he makes a really good point, did we really get to the point where we have so many unskilled workers in the force that recommendations about NOT doing something because it requires skilled labor to do is legitimate?

I share the sentiment that amazon & co are way too expensive beyond a simple proof of concept for example, even though for widely varying workload you may still need a public cloud.

<comment><USER21> I'm not talking about his point, I'm talking about the kind of tone calling a stranger an idiot.

<comment><USER3> Should I have danced around my view of his post to more subtly imply how I view it without _actually_ using the words instead of just straight out saying it like I did?

I'm not attacking the person; calling someone an idiot does appear to be a personal attack, but it was asked as a question -- I was trying to convey my bewilderment at how anyone could share his views ("you like pepsi over coke?! what are you some kind of hippy?! -- etc!)

Come on, we're grown up and this is our area of expertise, why should we censor ourselves -- I'm not sure how else I could have expressed my view on the whole thing so succinctly tbh. You knew what I meant right off didn't you?

Are you offended on the authors behalf? Do you think that person, who is clearly an experienced technologist and who appears to have spoken at a conference, who has views on what is a pretty insider issue and has spawned a debate on the whole thing on hackernews is going to be offended because someone on the internet thinks it's stupid?

If he is; then I'd like him to know that it wasn't my intention to offend but also -- this is the internet and we all benefit from frank honest discussions, which I'd like to have and if you have issues with people questioning what you've written a bit aggressively then perhaps you shouldn't have written it.

It's not like I'm going full youtube or /b/ here... This is a forum, and no personal attacks happened.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> We are in the same boat. We tried opencloud and has severe issues with our unified login - mix of AIX,samba,ladp,AD systems. I wonder how to convince universities who have legacy data and staff (aka Prof) who are unwilling to change to cloud especially in these days of data leak. Any pointers?

<comment><USER4> > […] who are unwilling to change to cloud especially in these days of data > leak.

I would start by addressing that concern, but it may come down to a matter of beliefs; i.e., you trust that 'the cloud' will be secure this next iteration (or the next, or the next), and they remain sceptical. Can't blame them.

</comment></comment><comment><USER24> What is the ratio between public and private cloud data centers is in terms of server count / data center count etc?

I think the amount of enterprise DC's / colocation facilities is pretty stable but that almost all of the growth is in public cloud. Don't have any data to back this up though.

<comment><USER25> In terms of existing infra, private DC capacity is surely an order of magnitude more than public cloud. New capacity getting installed might be a bit more evenly split. How you differentiate between any private infra and private cloud I don't know.

Public clouds often use colo facilities, especially for new/small regions. So colo != private.

<comment><USER6> Depends on the public cloud probider, but the leading providers are actively building their own buildings for expansion purposes.

For example MSFT investing $15B in its datacenter infrastructure. [https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/overview/datacenters/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en- us/overview/datacenters/).

GOOG naturally don't need to colo anything, they have their own [https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/](https://www.google.com/about/datacenters/inside/).

This article shows an analysis of DC vs. Public/Private Cloud IT Infrastructure: [http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/07/06/cloud...](http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2016/07/06/cloud- providers-will-spend-23b-on-data-center-hardware-in-2016-report/)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Can anyone tell me what typeface is being used on this graph?

[https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1546/1*6rkj6frEx5B...](https://d262ilb51hltx0.cloudfront.net/max/1546/1*6rkj6frEx5Bf8_s6sIi_9A.png)

<comment><USER27> Looks like Apple's "Chalkduster": [http://www.identifont.com/find?font=Chalkduster&q=Go](http://www.identifont.com/find?font=Chalkduster&q=Go)

<comment><USER26> It does! Thank you. :)</comment></comment></comment>


The new SimCity - <AUTHOR> http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/technology/2013/03/simcity_review_the_new_version_of_the_classic_game_is_totally_addictive.html?wpisrc=most_viral

<comment><USER2> <http://i.imgur.com/u4DVg94.png>

Always on DRM overloaded. Please come back in half an hour to play your single player game?

As my friend pointed out: "see if you can spot who got paid off by EA" <http://imgur.com/E9Nkgyo>

<comment><USER3> Isn't it a matter of time before someone release a crack/patch that eliminates the online DRM requirement? The bitter complaints seem a little pissant to me. (Then again my experience with the game is limited to one 20 minute session on friend's PC during the first beta period.

I'm annoyed that they didn't release concurrently for Mac. Also a bit relieved since I can't afford to spend a lot of time playing right now.

<comment><USER4> Well if the game logic/state is all server side (à la Diablo 2) then you would have to reimplement the game client side to get around DRM. However, not all games are like this.

<comment><USER5> IIRC, there _is_ logic that is done server side, but it is more of a basic simulation of the cities in the same region you are currently in, but are not currently managing.

For obvious reasons, the entire simulation couldn't be done server side. I've gotten numerous "trying to reconnect" messages and the game happily continues until it does reconnect to their servers.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> It's hard to take a review seriously that doesn't even mention the always on DRM issue.

<comment><USER7> Or the insanely small limitations on city size.

<comment><USER8> Or the large amount of bugs. Or the lack of a save & load feature. Or the impossibility of customizing the starting terrain. Or the severe lack of information the game gives you (seriously, were are all the graphs?).

It's a step back on many many ways.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> I think the Giant Bomb quick look here highlights a lot of the games strengths and problems better than this hyperbolic statement of "seriously addictive":

[http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look- simcity/2300-7103...](http://www.giantbomb.com/videos/quick-look- simcity/2300-7103/)

</comment><comment><USER10> It looks really nice. I played for about an hour but it started crashing so I'll have to wait for them to patch it before I can really dive in.

They've done a great job improving a lot of the UI issues of earlier games. In fact, the entire UI is really nice. I'm not too bothered by the small city size. It seems like by the time I'm done filling up an entire city's land area, I'll have pretty much dealt with whatever growth issues there are and any further increases will simply be more of the same. I don't really care about the DRM because, for all intents and purposes, I am always online.

I'm curious about the ongoing plans for the game, though. I have to admit I'd be surprised if they don't eventually increase the limits on city size.

<comment><USER11> > I don't really care about the DRM because, for all intents and purposes, I > am always online.

Sure, but what do you do when you want to play the game again in 10 years? 20 years? The servers will be long gone. DRM is going to steal away vast swathes of videogame history, which is a bit tragic.

It's teaching us all to treat videogames as a disposable commodity rather than something to be treasured. How much poorer would pop culture be if The Godfather or Lord of the Rings disappeared shortly after their creation, never to be seen again?

SimCity 2000 is nearly twenty years old, and it's still a great game. It's still important and worth remembering for all its innovations.

<comment><USER10> I don't have enough time to play all the good games that come out. I don't think I'll be broken-hearted. But I admit you have a point that it would be better if it was DRM free. It is still not a super big problem to me.

<comment><USER12> If you view DRM as a negative and you believe that there are more good games than you can play, you can subtract every game with DRM from your list, and still have enough good games!

<comment><USER10> It certainly doesn't annoy me enough to skip a game that would otherwise be at the top of my list.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> No Subways

Small City Size

No Thanks

<comment><USER14> Give it a month or two and I sadly suspect you'll be able to purchase all the features you'd like with micro-transactions.

 _"We're building into all of our games the ability to pay for things along the way."_ [1]

This kind of thinking from the games industry concerns me. If I've paid full price for a game, I don't think I should be nickel and dimed for more content.

[1] [http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187421/EA_details_microtr...](http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/187421/EA_details_microtransactionfilled_future.php)

<comment><USER15> I don't think that microtransactions are wrong, per se, but I do generally find it to be in bad taste. But that's an art versus entertainment question and the vast majority of the industry (and its customer base) have landed very firmly on "entertainment" which leads fairly inevitably to caring about nothing except profit.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> The first impressions article from Ars was a lot more useful to me:

[http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions- we...](http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/03/simcity-impressions-we-waited- ten-years-for-this/)

That article gives me the impression that it's more of a Sims game with Sim City bolted on than a real Sim City game.

<comment><USER17> That's absolutely false -- there are some obvious flaws with the game, but the complexity of simulation and macro-level focus is not one of them. I beta- tested, aka I actually got to play the game since all the servers are down.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> The new Simcity seems to be immensely detailed and specific, every action has a reaction and so on. Could this be used for city planning, I wonder just how specific you can get to a real life environment based on land mass, population, placement, climate, etc? I can't wait to play it, but am definitely not a fan of the always on DRM that ships with the game as it just deters and annoys actual purchasers of the game.

This didn't feel like a game review, rather just an excited guy gushing over the nostalgia of the original games but it was still an entertaining read and got me excited for the game even if details about DRM and features weren't mentioned.

So many great games coming out this year, games are getting extremely intelligent and advanced. Watch Dogs (the open world hacking game coming at the end of 2013) looks great as does GTA 5 and of course Starcraft 2: Heart of The Swarm.

<comment><USER19> > Could this be used for city planning...

Yes, yes it could:

[http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/453186-simcity-vs- suburban...](http://www.tested.com/tech/gaming/453186-simcity-vs-suburban- sprawl/)

[http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MikeRose/20130219/186896/Usin...](http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/MikeRose/20130219/186896/Using_SimCity_to_diagnose_my_home_towns_traffic_problem.php)

</comment></comment><comment><USER20> Except for that whole online DRM fun. The notion that you can't play the game if their servers are overloaded is outrageous. So now I can't just put it on my laptop and play it when and where I like, I need to be always connected to their servers.

Oh and no save/load feature. How stupid is that?

It's a seriously flawed game.

</comment><comment><USER21> Sounds a lot like a graphical version of Dwarf Fortress, without a lot of the complexity.

<comment><USER22> Whoever makes Dwarf Fortress with a Minecraft-like renderer will be rich :)

<comment><USER23> Or even a user interface which is not totally alien to anyone under 30 :)

[EDIT] Before anyone jumps in, I do know about towns etc. but in terms of gameplay depth they are all DF Lite.

[EDIT #2] Totally alien to _most_ people under 30 :)

<comment><USER11> It makes me sad that all the Dwarf Fortress imitators are not only quite shallow (they're management/building games rather than full-on sims), they also have fairly terrible interfaces. Towns' UI is poor, Gnomoria's is godawful.

I don't really know what they're thinking. Sure they have graphics, but that's about it.

<comment><USER24> My thoughts exactly. Additionally, their obsession with remaining 2D is probably one of the biggest apparent design flaws. The whole point of a GUI to a DF-like game would surely be to render it in a more information dense, immersive way - not seeing that at all when we're dealing with isometric 2D.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> Discrete simulation of every agent has been done before in 1996: Roller Coaster Tycoon. Each visitor would visit the park with a set amount of money, and would only spend their money if a ride interested them enough. Rides were modeled on intensity (among other factors). If a ride was too intense, some visitors wouldn't be happy. While if a ride was not intense enough, visitors would complain. All the while, your staff is out mowing the lawns, policing vandals, cleaning up vomit, and dealing with discrete interactions between every agent. It was a marvel in the 90s.

Other titles that model individual behavior are Tropico, Caesar 3, Pharaoh, and Dwarf Fortress (which has already created its own sub-comment thread).

I admit though, Sim City has always taken on a much larger scale. While Roller Coaster tycoon would scale to thousands of visitors, Sim City needs to scale to hundreds of thousands of citizens or even millions, on a much larger area than just a single amusement park.

I'll have to try it out, and see how it compares to the other simulators.

EDIT: For those curious, Tropico, Caesar 3, Pharaoh, and Roller Coaster Tycoon are all available DRM free download at "Good Ol Games" for ~$5 to $10. Dwarf Fortress is an ASCII-art free game with a niche following, but definitely deserves a mention in this category of "discrete agents".

<comment><USER26> Sim City usually needs to scale that far, but this version has a much smaller scale. The "cities" are only something like 2km by 2km squares. It's really more "Sim Suburb"

<comment><USER27> You can still have populations of over 200,000 in your city. Which is impressive given that all agents are simulated individually.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I like how this article lies from the very first word (of the title). City size limits are tiny compared to earlier versions of SimCity, so it's the exact opposite of "bigger".

</comment><comment><USER29> I'm pretty sure the DRM aspect of this entire thing is very secondary to the "significant server side work being done"

Yeah, servers are overloaded. Join the club of every other MMO ever. They won't be in a few days.

</comment><comment><USER30> So it's like Minecraft?</comment>


This is what happened when Australia introduced tight gun controls - <AUTHOR> http://edition.cnn.com/2015/06/19/world/us-australia-gun-control/ <comment><USER2> Someone I know commented on this when I posted something similar to Facebook. He said:

        If Australia had the criminal gangs and the
        drug war which both empowers and assaults
        those gangs, as America has, the results
        might have been different.

        To say nothing of any discussion of defensive
        rights or of genocides.

He also talks elsewhere about how home-invasions would become endemic if home- owners were prevented from having guns. In other words, America is effectively lawless, and so-called "gun control" can't and won't work, as it will expose law-abiding citizens to unacceptable risks. The ownership of guns is part and parcel of American society, and cannot be removed without the immediate collapse of law and order.

Is this true? Who can say. But when one of the "good guys with guns" gets shot in his car by a law-and-order officer, one wonders.

</comment><comment><USER3> The Daily Show did a segment on Australia Gun Control.

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVuspKSjfgA](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mVuspKSjfgA)

I'd like to see a comparison of how strict California (the state with the toughest gun laws) is compared to Australia.

[http://political- issues.insidegov.com/stories/10617/states-t...](http://political- issues.insidegov.com/stories/10617/states-toughest-gun-laws#25-Gun-Control- Overview)

It helps that Australia is an island so people can't just drive to the next state over where laws might be more lax.

<comment><USER2> Er, in Australia one _can_ drive to the next state over where the laws might be more lax. These laws were federal laws, just as one can have in the good ol' US of A.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> And Australia _still_ has half again more violent crime of, say, Iowa, which has essentially _no_ gun laws. What's good for the goose may very well be irrelevant to the gander.</comment>


Ask HN: Does anyone enjoy working with Facebook's Graph API? - <AUTHOR>

I've worked with Facebook's platform and APIs on and off since they launched them in 2007.  It's always been the same - meaning nails on the chalkboard horrible.
The Graph API got a lot of great "reviews" but I don't know if anyone actually used it first before giving it praise.  On one hand it's great in theory, but on the other hand it's horribly broken and poorly documented.
As a developer this is how things usually go.
1) Something isn't working as I expect so I look at the docs.
2) Realize the behavior isn't documented and search on Google.
3) Click on numerous results linking to Facebook's forum to read about lots of others having the same question - Facebook rarely replies or clarifies.
4) Implement a hacky work around because I'll never know if it was on my end or theirs.
Am I the only one with this workflow?

  *
 <comment><USER2> Same here. Plus...

\- There are many things you cant do with Graph, so I'm still sticking on using the old REST Api.

\- Facebook OAuth 2.0 implementation is incomplete, e.g. no refresh access_token method provided.

\- Current support for iFrame Facebook.com apps is premature.

With all these, they even planned to remove old authentication method & going full force on iFrame end of this year. Hopefully they really can fix all those problems by then.

</comment><comment><USER3> I actually enjoy working with facebook's open graph api, BUT Using the PHP & JS SDK is a nightmare. I wrote my own class in PHP using curl, all data is returned in JSON which for me makes things simple. Retrieving the access token and authenticating each user can be handled a number of ways. Ever since they updated there policies, you are now allowed to store all of the users info once they allow your "application". I've seen alot of people complain when they use the new SDK's, but I see no reason to go that route...I think the best way whether it be a application,fan page, or external site is to present your app first, let the user actually see it and not FORCE them to allow it (which 90% of most apps do)...Once they peform a action, either redirect/ or popup/iframe to the authorization url;. I use the 'offline' permission so the access token for each user doesn't expire. Once they allow it, pull any info you want by a simple curl request, then store all there info(including access token) in your DB. Simple as that! There are only a few things I dislike, there like/comment buttons, and how you are limited to using either there iframe or xfbml (which is still an iframe).

</comment><comment><USER4> This is about par for the course. I've integrated facebook into many an application, and found the same: Facebook's API is buggy, their developer support is nonexistent, and digging up current and relevant results from google is challenging.

I can think of quite a few things Facebook could do to improve the experience of developers using their services, but people are already doing so in droves, and their competition is withering, so I don't see much of a chance of this improving dramatically.

Expect incremental improvements as they reach out into the general web more and more. For example, as bad as the current API is, the old one was worse.

</comment><comment><USER5> That's exactly what I experienced (and still do) while working with Facebook APIs. Sometimes, it is better to search StackOverflow first.</comment>


Microsoft Finds Cancer Clues in Search Queries - <AUTHOR> http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/08/technology/online-searches-can-identify-cancer-victims-study-finds.html <comment><USER2> Previous: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858962](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11858962)</comment>


The physics of that 'kickalicious' kick - <AUTHOR> http://www.empiricalzeal.com/2012/12/31/the-physics-of-that-kickalicious-kick/?src=search <comment><USER2> Hi- I'm the author of the piece (on twitter at @aatishb) and am happy to field questions on the post. Do people accept that the video isn't faked? The data isn't perfect, but it was good enough to convince me that the video is real.

Here's a follow up question, that I haven't thought much about. Assume that Rugland launches the first ball at 64 degrees and at 14.4 m/s (about 32 mph). 1.5 seconds later, and 1.5 meters ahead, he kicks the second ball. (So far these are the numbers I get from the data). My question is, given the size of a football, how accurate does he need to be in the launch speed and angle of the second ball, in order to be able to strike the first ball?

You might need to assume a reasonable range for the launch speed to work this out.

<comment> T-hawk Here's a first-order approximation. I'll assume the angle is perfect and work out the speed range. The first ball decelerated to maybe 8 m/s given its altitude at collision and some loss to air friction. If the ball is 25 cm wide, it crosses its own diameter in 1/32 second.

Assume the distance of the collision is 10m from launch and occurs 1.7 seconds after the second kick. The margin of error on the arrival time is 1/32 / 1.7 = 1.84%. Using your launch speed centered around your value of 38 mph = 16.9875 m/s, that means the possible range was 16.675 to 17.300 m/s. Interestingly, that's a difference of 1.4 miles per hour, which is also roughly the precision of velocity that baseball pitchers can produce on demand.

By the way, there's more variables on the inputs to the second ball. The timing of the kick is important and controllable too, creating a three- dimensional map of inputs. This could be transformed into and visualized as a 3D graph, showing all the combinations of speed/angle/timing that will result in a collision.

Also, the left-to-right angle must be on target too or the balls won't be in the same vertical plane for any collision at all.

<comment><USER3> About the vertical angle that you assumed to be perfect: I don't think that is critical. If you hit the second ball a bit higher/lower than intended, it crosses the trajectory of the first ball higher/lower than intended, so it must be at the intersection point earlier/later. Luckily, you get some of that for free, as the intersection point will be closer by/farther away.

All else being equal, the harder you can kick, the easier this gets. The lower the arc of the first ball, the smaller the angle of intersection between the two trajectories, and the easier the hit. You can get a lower arc by giving the ball more horizontal speed, keeping vertical speed the same (just decreasing vertical speed won't help; the first ball would hit the floor before you can hit it with the second ball)

Of course, all else isnt equal; directional errors likely are some function increasing with both distance and ball speed.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Human are capable of amazing things. Rémi Gaillard has for example been known for this very specific skill for years.

One example can be viewed at [http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v...](http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=BURnfFozfO4#t=140s)

<comment><USER5> And capable of funny things as well. This is a 2009 video of that same guy who roams the streets of Montpellier with apparently some soccer balls to spare: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QfKFIzX7jSY>

<comment><USER6> I think soccer bowling has a real shot at becoming an Olympic sport! :-)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> First of all- I totally buy that this video is legit, it would probably simply be easier to actually make all of these kicks than it would be to fake the videos. Plus, he's not saying he can make that kick every time, he freely admits that it took him many tries, so while it's impressive it's not so superhumanly accurate that it's impossible to imagine.

But, if I were going to fake the video, I'd have my kicker kick the first ball for real and mime kicking the second (or if that looks fake, really kick a second ball but paint it out)- and then use the same video physics package this guy used to predict where the balls should be at time t, painting the second ball (and both balls, after they "collide") in, frame-by-frame, on the path it charts out.

</comment><comment><USER8> And here we have empirical (zeal) evidence that should make you reconsider calling someone a "dumb jock". Rugland calculated in his head what a PhD in Physics worked out on paper. We call it coordination. I look at it as another facet of intelligence.

<comment><USER9> > Rugland calculated in his head what a PhD in Physics worked out on paper.

Besides that the problem doesn't begin to approach PhD-level...

You could probably say the same thing of me when I'm running or cycling. But whatever calculations my brain performs, the results are not accessible to myself or to anyone else; and I can't tell my brain what calculations to perform, so I can't tell anyone else what angle to lean at, and if I go to the moon I will have to let it work out for itself that gravity is not a universal constant.

You could also say the same thing when a cat twists in midair to land on its feet, "using" the principles of angular momentum. (Scare quotes because the cat has no idea what angular momentum is.)

Rugland's feat is certainly impressive. (And in a different class to my examples, in that he doesn't get constant feedback; if my balance is wrong I can adjust, if he kicks wrong the ball misses. But you could describe my feedback-integration using complicated physics as well, so I don't think that invalidates my point. I'm pretty sure "knife throwing" and "blindfold juggling" would have been suitable examples, but I don't personally possess those skills.) And I'm certainly not saying he's stupid.

But to call this intelligence, seems to be extending the word far beyond its usual boundaries.

<comment><USER10> I wonder if there is a way to make the results of those calculations visible? i.e. you can't calculate an intersection of two arcs, but if a VR environment showed you a ball and said "Throw another ball to hit it", could you then get a good approximation? Just thinking out loud.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Nice video and analysis, but the big animation programs all contain simulation packages, which will calculate precisely this, it may even be easier to simulate the collision than to animate by hand. ( And what really put me off in the video is the use of time lapse in the repeated kicks, precisely at the moment where one could hide a cut.)

On the other hand a NFL level kicker is roughly 50% for 50+ yard field goals. [1] Therefore the 5 50 yard field goals should be possible for an NFL kicker in something like 2^5/2=16 tries. ( Similar for the 60, 50 etc sequence, using again the stats,

1/3.* (24./47)* (96./141.)* (120./136)* (119/121.) = .1

it should require something like 10 tries. ( Assuming a probability of 1/3. for the 60 yrd.) So I think the video is genuine, but only because I wonder why anyone would spoil an impressive video by just one special effects shot.) To really convince me, one would need to calculate the kick of the second ball, since this is the moment where animation and reality have to match.

[1] e.g. David Ackers 24 - 47 for 50+ <http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/players/4587/career>

<comment><USER12> Actually, for 2012, kickers are 61% for 50+ yard field goals [1], including an incredible 10/10 performance.

[1] <http://sports.yahoo.com/nfl/stats/byposition?pos=K>

<comment><USER13> I bet they do better in practice on an empty field than in a game where they have a limited amount of time and a bunch of big guys headed their way quick.

<comment><USER14> This has always amazed me when basketball players are practicing. For the shots they specialize in, their miss rate is 0% with no guarding or pressure.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> I remember a section from Feynman's "Surely you are joking..." where he says he went over a textbook chapter for Newton's laws and found a graph, purportedly from an experiment where they rolled a ball down an inclined plane. He says the graph followed the equations perfectly, with a little Gaussian noise sprinkled in, but they had neglected to account for the rotational inertia of the ball, and so he concluded that the 'experiment' was faked.

</comment><comment><USER16> It seems to me that most of these kicks are better suited for a different sport.

<comment><USER17> Soccer. In fact, the acrobatic "freestyle soccer" sub-category.

</comment></comment><comment><USER18> I'm more of a soccer fan, and there's this video of a famous soccer player Ronaldinho doing the "crossbar challenge" - from about 30-40 yards out, he repeatedly hits the crossbar with a soccer ball, only to have it come back to him. The precision required to pull of such a feat is just mind boggling. <http://youtu.be/KNwLn85I75Y?t=1m25s>

<comment><USER19> Sorry but that Ronaldinho video is a Nike ad and is obviously fake!

<comment><USER18> I knew it was an ad. But, I wouldn't be surprised if a professional soccer player could pull that off. Also, could you tell me why you think it is "obviously fake"?

<comment><USER20> I've played soccer for years, including with some ex-professionals and I'd be very surprised if any player could hit the crossbar that many times in a row from that distance with that precision. The bit that screams "obviously fake", for me at least, is the near perfect return trajectory each time.

Hitting the crossbar requires kicking something ~8.5" in diameter at something 5" wide so you've got a 'window' of 22" to aim at. With practice you might be able to do it 3/5 times from 20 yards.

(3/5)^4 =~ 1/8

So 8 tries to do it 4 times in a row.

To get the ball to come back like that each time the 'window' is now about 1" (if that). Outside that window and it bounces down to the ground, or glances the bar and goes behind the goal, or bounces way up in the air and never returns to you. So each kick is now 3/(5x22) and (3/(5x22))^4 = 1 in 1.8 million. Good luck.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER21> Reminds me of Rémi Gaillard

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ps6s45Pg0To></comment>


Leaked Documents Reveal Anti-Piracy Cash Operation - <AUTHOR> http://torrentfreak.com/leaked-documents-reveal-anti-piracy-cash-operation-091115/

<comment><USER2> If it wouldn't be for the scumbags running the media industry I'm sure file sharing would not have gotten as much traction as it did. Now that some of the more sordid details are becoming publicly known the public will find less and less reasons to be swung by the crocodile tears of the media industry.

For me the piece by Janis Ian was an eye opener, the movie or the music industry does not seem to make much difference in general when it comes to their attitude to the general public.

It's all about money, and it really doesn't matter whether they'll get it from you legally, by hook or by crook.

If I ever get into a really bad mood I'm going to set up a service where you can order hard drives with 'random' bits on them at cost.

</comment><comment><USER3> Downloading shouldn't be illegal. It's not _my_ responsibility to determine if what is sent to me is copyrighted, free, or in the public domain. There are freely available music, movies, and games on the internet. It's not absurd.

<comment><USER4> Well, if you acted in good faith I'm sure that would be a fair defense. For example, buying stolen goods is illegal in most countries. If you're buying something used for 60% of retail price off a classifieds site that turns to be stolen, that would in be good faith. You might lose the stolen item in any case, but you would not be prosecuted.

Similarly if you were downloading a black & white movie off some official looking site that claims to collect out-of-copyright films.

But if you're downloading a 2009 blockbuster off Pirate Bay using BitTorrent, that's clearly malicious. But it's not even that kind of case that's being civilly prosecuted by RIAA and its ilk -- it's only when you start uploading this material to others that they strike.

Personally I find the behaviour of many of the pirates pathethic. Just admit that you want ready access to material that was expensive to create for free already, don't make some nonsensical claims about free speech or restrictive copyrights or oppressive record companies.

Want to fight exploitive record companies? Buy only music from independents, support those band tours'. Ignore newest pop albums from RIAA companies. Tell everyone how great your independent band is, play their music at parties.

Want to oppose restrictive copyrights? Make everything you create true Public Domain. Microsoft using your PD code in a commercial product? Great, your work is being put to good use.

<comment><USER3> I think uploading is the threshold for illegality, but I still think downloading should be a safe zone. It's up to the gov't to make sure no one breaks the law by providing copyrighted stuff for free.

Morally speaking if I know something shouldn't be freely available online, it would be wrong to download it, almost like how it would be wrong to buy something you know is stolen.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> This is what otherwise is known as a _racket_</comment>


Would you hire me for freelance work? - <AUTHOR>

I'm 19 and I'm going to move out of my parent's basement in a few months and I need to start saving up for rent so I'm trying to look anywhere I can to find long-term clients or short-term work so that I can manage studying without losing all my time on doing non-freelance work.
I'm an educated and experienced graphic, web and web designer looking to do some work. I can help you with

  Identity: Logo, Branding, Style

  Print, Brochures, Flyers, Books, Covers,
      Business Cards, Cards, etc...

  Websites: Mock-ups, redesigns, front-end,
      touch ups, wordpress, custom theme,
      css3, html5, jquery, making your site responsive, ...
 I'm still a student but I have a few years of experience with design and freelancing. PM me for any questions or offers.
Website: http://illyism.com
Dribbble: http://dribbble.com/illyism
If you don't like either of those, here is an Imgur album: http://imgur.com/a/gelej <comment><USER2> I'm not in a position to hire anyone, but I thought I would mention that on google chrome your galleries act kind of oddly.

If I click on logos I can see the Leaf looking one, click next and it takes me to a check mark, click next and previous and it goes no where, just stuck on the check mark.

<comment><AUTHOR> Oh shoot, you're right. It seems that it's only an error on Chrome Canary. It's fine on Chrome (and beta), FF, IE, Safari and Opera.

It's also fine on 25.0.1364.172 m and 26.0.1410.40 beta-m

Odd stuff, it's debug time!

<comment><USER2> Very odd! My version is Version 26.0.1410.33 beta-m

Updating now

Edit* Also does it on Version 26.0.1410.40 beta-m for me

<comment><AUTHOR> Chrome had some issues with checking if the CSS3 transition was finished. And it's fixed now.

Thanks for letting me know, xauronx. I appreciate it a lot.

<comment><USER2> No problem! Double checked it and it works well for me.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Looks cool, you will probably be hearing from me soon about some design work. :)

</comment><comment><USER4> Shoot me an email. I'd like to talk about some potenti work.

</comment><comment><USER5> Have you tried certificationpoint.org yet?

</comment><comment><USER6> Your name on website is listed as: ILIAS ISMANALIJEV English isn't my native language, but I lived in US for 20+ years. There are a lot of practical jokes based on names, such as spell 'CUP' (see you pee). When I look at your name, I see 'ISM' followed by a foul 4-letter word. (that last word in US is going to get some giggles). My suggestion would be to get a different translation for your last name. You could probably even cut it to Isman.

Although maybe I'm the only one who sees it this way. Please do not be offended.

This is similar advice I just had to pass on to a friend 'Svetlana', to call herself 'Lana', instead of 'Sveta', as in US 'Sveta' isn't easy to pronounce, and 'Lana' sounds better to American-born from what I see.

<comment><USER7> This is ridiculous. And why do non-Americans have to comply with white American names?

<comment><USER8> You don't. Choices produce results. That's life and not because of a particular country.

<comment><USER7> I have a non-American name and never had an issue with it. In fact, I may be have been extra lucky at times.</comment></comment></comment></comment>


The guy who knew Nintendo's Switch surprise has pled guilty to hacking - <AUTHOR> https://www.theverge.com/2020/1/31/21117596/nintendo-switch-surprise-pled-guilty-hacking-department-justice-ryan-hernandez <comment><USER2> I read the article and it's about this person hacking Nintendo servers and stealing confidential information. But I still don't understand what Nintendo's Switch surprise is? Can someone fill me in? I am aware of what a Nintendo Switch is.

<comment><USER3> From the article it looks like he published information about the existence of the Nintendo Switch before Nintendo officially announced it

<comment><USER4> That seems to be correct: "That stolen information, including pre-release information about the anticipated Nintendo Switch console, was leaked to the public." \-- from [https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/california-man-who- hack...](https://www.justice.gov/usao-wdwa/pr/california-man-who-hacked- nintendo-servers-steal-video-games-and-other-proprietary)

I think this may be a better link since it's most likely the press release that this article is based on, and doesn't have a clickbait title

<comment><USER5> And got nailed for child pornography. You stay you Palmdale.

<comment><USER6> Every other comment saying this has been killed, but...how to trust this charge anymore, I have no idea.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> > In October 2017, the FBI contacted Hernandez and his parents to ask him to > stop hacking, at which time Hernandez "confirmed that he understood the > consequences of any future hacking."</comment>